Hellmuth Felmy
Hellmuth Felmy (born May 28, 1885 in Berlin , † December 14, 1965 in Darmstadt ) was a German officer , most recently General der Flieger in World War II . He was convicted as a war criminal in the Generals Trial in Southeastern Europe in 1948.
Life
Felmy joined the infantry regiment "von der Marwitz" (8th Pomeranian) No. 61 on October 18, 1904 as an ensign . After promotions on August 18, 1905 lieutenant and on January 21, 1913 Lieutenant he was the outbreak of the First World War on December 24, 1914 Captain appointed.
During the First World War Felmy was an air officer a. a. Leader of a "Fliegerabteilung 300", which was nicknamed " Pascha ". The division flew in Palestine from 1916 to 1918 . In the theater of war there , Felmy was the most famous German pilot in the British armed forces. As a 'by-product' of military reconnaissance activities (reconnaissance photography), 'flight archeology' emerged , as ancient buildings were clearly visible from the air, while they could not be seen from the ground. During his time in the Middle East, Felmy cut a British long-distance water pipeline by means of an airborne company - together with his comrade Lieutenant Richard Falke. The British expeditionary force had short-term supply problems as a result. The attempt on May 25, 1917 to blow up the important railway line at El Qantara , far behind the front line, failed, however. Towards the end of the First World War, Felmy was transferred to the High Command of the Protection Forces in the Reich Colonial Office in 1918 .
Since the Reichswehr was no longer allowed to own aircraft according to the provisions of the Versailles Treaty , Felmy served during the Weimar Republic in the motor vehicle troops and in the infantry , in which he was appointed major on January 1, 1927 . On November 1, 1933, he joined the still camouflaged Air Force, which was under construction , as a colonel , and was initially commander of the air force schools. Promoted to major general on January 1, 1936 , he became the commanding general in Luftkreis VII. After being promoted to lieutenant general on April 20, 1937 and to general of the aviators on February 4, 1938 , he became commander of the air force group command on April 1, 1938 2, from which Air Fleet 2 was formed in February 1939 .
At the beginning of the war, Felmy was Commander-in-Chief of Air Fleet 2, which was deployed in the west during the attack on Poland and the Seat War. However, on January 12, 1940, he was relieved of his command and discharged from the Wehrmacht because two officers belonging to his staff had lost their way in bad weather and had made an emergency landing in Belgium with their aircraft ( Mechelen incident ). On board they had documents about the planned western offensive (against the neutral Benelux countries), some of which ended up in the hands of the enemy.
After the war expanded into the Mediterranean, Felmy was reactivated in the army because of his Middle East experience. From May 23 to June 20, 1941, Felmy headed a so-called “German military mission to Iraq ” from Greece with the code name “ Sonderstab F ” (for Felmy), which had over 40 employees (number: as of late May 1941). Their tasks were: to support the anti-British military in Iraq, who had taken power there in April through a military coup , as well as other anti-British military in the area; Gathering experience and secret information for the Wehrmacht. At the end of May, Felmy met with Fritz Grobba and Joachim Ribbentrop on the subject of "Political preparations for the German offensive by the Arab countries". The three said the Arabs were hostile to the British and that their attitude should be promoted through German radio broadcasts and leaflets.
Felmy became Commander South Greece on June 21, 1941 under the Wehrmacht Commander Southeast, but retained his position as Chief of Special Staff F, which was directly subordinate to OKW and whose tasks were expanded and specified again in an "Instruction for Special Staff F" on the same day . According to this, the special staff F should become "the central branch office for all questions in the Arab world that affect the armed forces". Furthermore, the so-called Sonderverband 288 was set up from soldiers of the Wehrmacht and Arab translators , to which the Sonderverband 287 , also known as the “German-Arab Legion”, later joined.
In September 1942, Felmy's staff in southern Russia became a General Command z. b. V. set up, which was intended for companies on the other side of the Caucasus to the Persian Gulf and to which, in addition to the special association 287, various Eastern units were subordinate. In total, the Felmy subordinate units comprised about 6000 men. Due to the events of the Battle of Stalingrad and Operation Edelweiss in the Caucasus , these plans became obsolete and Felmy returned to Greece in early 1943. His corps was now in LXVIII. Army Corps and took part in the disarmament of the Italian troops in Greece in the case of the Axis .
In a conspiratorial agreement with the archaeologist Roland Hampe , Art Protection German Archaeological Institute, Athens, and a Greek lawyer from Crete, Felmy determined the modalities of the German withdrawal from Greece to the security service of the Reichsführer SS (SD) with a joint : dismantling of the already assembled explosive charges at the marathon reservoir and at the power station in Piraeus as well as the release of the inmates of the Chaidari concentration camp near Athens, including Archbishop Damaskinos Papandreou , Athens declared an " open city " against an escort of the SD by the Wehrmacht back to Germany through the already collapsed south-eastern front. The men of the SD in Athens agreed. Papandreou was able to agree with the Greek partisans that they would refrain from attacks on the withdrawing troops and that Athens was therefore not destroyed by fighting in October 1944 when the Germans withdrew and the British entered. During the retreat from the Balkans, Felmy exchanged posts with Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller in December and took over his XXXIV. Army corps, which he led until the end of the war.
After the war ended in 1945, Felmy was indicted in the Nuremberg Trials in 1948 as a war criminal in the hostage murder trial and sentenced to 15 years in prison for his involvement in war crimes in Greece. In the course of the intensified discussion of the West German rearmament after the outbreak of the Korean War from the summer of 1950, High Commissioner John McCloy reduced Felmy's prison sentence to ten years on January 31, 1951 on the recommendation of the Advisory Board on Clemency for War Criminals ( Peck Panel ). Felmy, like most war criminals, was then released early; on December 15, 1951, he left the Landsberg correctional facility .
In Darmstadt he was later chairman of the traditional association " Old Eagles ", as aviation pioneers called themselves at the time, who had passed the pilot's exam in Germany on August 1, 1914, according to the regulations of the German Aviation Association before the outbreak of the First World War.
Felmy was the older brother of Major General Gerhard Felmy . Hellmuth Felmy was married to Helene Felmy, b. Boettcher, and the father of the German theater and film actor Hansjörg Felmy and his two older brothers Helmut (* 1927) and Hubertus (* 1928).
Awards
- Order of the Crown IV class
- Iron Cross (1914) 2nd and 1st class
- Knight's Cross of the Royal House Order of Hohenzollern with swords
- Hanseatic Cross Hamburg
- Austrian Military Merit Cross III. Class with the war decoration
- Iron crescent
- Silver Imtiyaz medal with saber
- Silver Liakat medal with saber
- Prussian military pilot badge
- Wehrmacht service award IV. To I. class
- Clasp for the Iron Cross, 2nd and 1st class
- German cross in gold on January 16, 1945
literature
- Hans-Ulrich Seidt: Berlin, Kabul, Moscow. Oskar Ritter von Niedermayer and Germany's geopolitics. Universitas, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-8004-1438-4 , pp. 311-316 (on the Felmy special staff, the commando company in Iraq).
- Gerhard Weber: Hellmuth Felmy. Stations in a military career. Suez Front - Reichswehr - Air Fleet II - Special Unit F - LXVIII. Army Corps in Greece - Nuremberg Trial , Ruhpolding 2010, ISBN 978-3-447-06299-2
Web links
-
Special staff F "About tribes in the Middle East" Speculation by the "So-Stabs F" (for Felmy) about power relations in the region that could serve the Nazi war aims, source Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv = BA-MA, RH 24-68 / 5
- ibid. (scroll down) Hellmuth Felmy, Commander SoSt F: Excerpt from BA-MA, ZA 1/2257: The German exploitation of the Arab indigenous movement in the Second World War. (P-207), approx. 1955 , Part I, pp. 91–100 (After 1945, a dispute raged among the losers about why their Islamic fascist line had failed. Felmy's view on this)
- ibid. (further down): Walter Warlimont (OKW) further excerpt that., Part II = pp. 178–181 (the opposite view)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b : F. M. Cutlack The Australian Flying Corps in the Western and Eastern Theaters of War, 1914-1918 (edition 11th, 1941).
- ↑ Quoted from Walther Hubatsch (ed.): Hitler's instructions for warfare 1939–1945. Documents of the High Command of the Wehrmacht. Bernard & Graefe, Frankfurt a. M. 1962.
- ↑ Dietrich Eichholtz: War for Oil: An oil empire as a German war goal (1938-1943). Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2006. ISBN 3-86583-119-2 . P. 136 ff.
- ^ Roland Hampe: The rescue of Athens in October 1944 , Vowinkel, Heidelberg & Steiner, Wiesbaden 1955.
- ↑ Norbert Frei: Politics of the Past . Beck, Munich 1996, pp. 222-223.
- ↑ Peter Schwarz: The plundering of Greece and the return of the "German question" limited preview in the Google book search
- ↑ Rotary presents “We Wunderkinder” in the Soester Universe In: Soester Anzeiger from April 3, 2014.
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i Ranking list of the German Reichsheeres , Mittler & Sohn Verlag, Berlin, p. 121.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Felmy, Hellmuth |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German officer, most recently General der Flieger in World War II |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 28, 1885 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Berlin |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 14, 1965 |
| Place of death | Darmstadt |